The name of the talk was "MSPs, You are the Captain of Your Own Ship; Don't Let Anyone Else Take the Wheel...". During this talk, I spoke of the importance of gaining knowledge over time, as opposed to just collecting tools to do a job.
We work in a world where automation is king. The advent of the tools and automation aspect has been the driving force behind the managed service provider movement. Without those tools, service providers could not effectively manage the number of desktops and servers that they are expected to administer. During my career, which has spanned close to 25 years now, I've seen the number of devices under management by a single person go from low dozens to 100, to even thousands. This Network World Article from 2004 lists 15 as a potential number of servers, and 45-50 network devices for a network manager as a potential target.
Tooling and consistency across the environments have allowed these numbers to grow wildly. At our MSP, CNWR, we're managing thousands of devices with a relatively small team. Specialized tools make that possible.
However, in our industry, we've seen a move towards just collecting and buying tools. Often times the critical steps of understanding the problem are left out of the mix altogether, and the provider just picks from the available tools to "solve" the problem they need to be solved, or to fill the missing gap in their service catalog.
This lack of understanding comes to a head where there is an issue. I have seen incidents where a provider believes their security vendor is taking care of remediation, when in reality they are triaging and escalating. The vendor can then not get ahold of anyone at the provider when there is an incident, and the issue spreads.
The talk was to encourage providers to gain knowledge and then use that knowledge in a quest to pick the tools that best help them solve the problem. By doing this, we can shop on ROI, as well as be safe in the knowledge we've picked out a thing that will help us most.
The talk was well attended, I estimate 100 or so in attendance. I was excited to share my knowledge and look forward to doing it again in the future.
